What’s in your back yard? Some people have a fire pit, or a small pond with water lilies and koi, or a trampoline and a tree house. Matt Lucas has a 200-year-old log cabin.
“I’ve always been interested in old things,” says Lucas, a D.C.-area native who graduated from UVA and made a career in the software industry. When he and his family were ready to leave northern Virginia in 2004 in favor of a more rural lifestyle, they bought a mid-1800s farmhouse in Free Union. The house needed more than a little work—in fact, the appraiser put a negative value on it. Lucas spent the next two years restoring the farmhouse. “It was hard work,” he recalls, but he was hooked. His wife Tricia says the Free Union farmhouse “was his training wheels.”
Soon Lucas had acquired a 19th-century house in Freetown that supposedly once served as a general store/community hub for the free Black community there; its restoration is still underway. Then he purchased a Civil War-era Crozet house that had been moved from its original site to a lot next to The Yellow Mug—Lucas has been working on that one for the last five years.
In 2016, Albemarle County Supervisor Ann Mallek—who knew Lucas as a neighbor in Free Union—came calling. Engineering firm Froehling & Robertson wanted to expand its facility in Yancey Mills, but that would mean razing a log cabin that had been there for 200 years. Mallek wanted to preserve this little piece of history, noted on the Virginia Landmarks Register as an example of “a vernacular architectural style common to Virginia.” She asked Lucas if he would take on the challenge.
Lucas offered to relocate the little building to the yard behind the house he was restoring downtown. The Crozet Community Advisory Council was very supportive, he says, not only of his acquiring the building but in agreeing to rezoning his lot. In 2017, once the approvals and planning were completed, the cabin (which was too unstable to be lifted and moved) had to be disassembled by hand and reconstructed in its new location.
And that was just the beginning. Over its 200-year life (“Is it pre-Revolutionary War? We’re not sure,” he says), the building had been adapted as its uses changed. Lucas has heard it may have originally served as a roadside tavern for travelers headed over the mountains, while at a later point, when it was likely a family home, the log walls were covered with wood siding. Very little of the structure could be retained, either due to deterioration or because the building had to be brought up to modern codes if anyone was ever going to go inside.
For those reasons, Lucas hasn’t attempted a complete restoration. Rather, he says, “I wanted to keep its historic character.” So three walls are constructed of the original logs, with the adze marks still visible, and chinked with historically accurate mortar, and the back wall is built of logs reclaimed from another old structure. The heart pine wood flooring in the main room was salvaged from a cabin in the Scottsville area; the second floor is wood from an old silo. The chimney is not brick but fieldstone, as it would have originally been. And the bathroom Lucas added is floored in bluestone salvaged from another house lost to time.
After a decade of buying and reclaiming historic properties, Lucas has a well-developed network of artisans and restoration enthusiasts—plus a barn full of logs and stone, metalwork, fixtures, woodwork, and other furnishings he’s picked up in years of roaming central Virginia to purchase or salvage from old properties. For this project, he had invaluable help on both the reconstruction and the interiors from father-and-son historic restoration team Peter and Blake Hunter of Batesville.
But while Lucas wants the cabin to be as historic as possible, he has an eclectic appreciation for all old things—and a modern desire for good plumbing, heating, and lighting. The kitchen has a counter made from old barn flooring, a late-19th century J.L. Mott sink, and a vintage Chambers stove (c. 1940s). The bathroom has a vintage sink, 20th-century light fixtures, and a contemporary glass-walled open shower.
Proud of having a reclaimed piece of history in his back yard, Lucas enjoys that patrons sitting out back at The Yellow Mug can look over and see the restored cabin. But he also wants the old building to come back to life by being used again. He and Tricia considered turning the cabin into a bed-and-breakfast, but decided to use it as a space for entertaining. Their trial run: holding their daughter’s wedding rehearsal dinner there. “It was a perfect setting for a family gathering,” says Lucas.